Computers are utilized in personal, professional, educational and other areas and fields to perform functions, provide services, and/or facilitate access to content. Examples of such content include text, audio, images, audiovisual or multimedia material, executables, some combination thereof, and other content. Creators of much of this content often rely on intellectual property protections such as copyright to secure control and compensation for their works. However, rights holders also usually wish to supplement these legal protections with technical protections. This is especially true of content that is in a digital form because digital content can be copied, sold, shared, transferred, viewed, otherwise used, etc. without undergoing any degradation. Consequently, there is no natural technical-based expiration or other limitation on digital content once it has been disseminated.
One technique for offering technical protections (i.e., control) over content is digital rights management (DRM). DRM can limit, for example, a user's access to content. Such limitations may include, for instance, limiting the number of times content may be experienced, limiting the number of transfers of content, limiting the amount of time content may be experienced, limiting allowable modifications to content, and so forth. DRM may be implemented in any of a myriad of manners; however, any of these myriad of manners are generally intended to provide technical controls over content.
Computers typically employ application programs in order to provide the aforementioned functions, services, and content access. These application programs facilitate content viewing, content modifying, and content experiencing in general. Traditionally, in order for DRM to be effective in controlling content use, the application that is attempting to interact with DRM-controlled content must be DRM-aware and capable of enforcing DRM controls. This conventional approach to DRM may be effective for new applications being developed today for a DRM-enabled world. Unfortunately, there are many legacy applications that are already present on computers and that have no understanding of or ability to interact with DRM-controlled content.
Accordingly, there is a need for schemes and/or techniques to enable legacy applications to interact with DRM-controlled content.